JANE EYRE'S PURSE: WOMEN'S QUEER ECONOMIC DESIRE IN THE VICTORIAN NOVEL

Abstract

“Young ladies don't understandpolitical economy, you know,” asserts the casually misogynistic uncle of Dorothea Brooke in George Eliot'sMiddlemarch(1871) (17; bk. 1, ch 1). Although Eliot's heroine resents both her uncle's remark and “that never-explained science which was thrust as an extinguisher over all her lights,” her attempt to teach herself political economy in the novel only seems to confirm her uncle's assessment (18; bk. 1, ch. 1): Dorothea gathers a “little heap of books on political economy” and sets forth to learn “the best way of spending money so as not to injure one's neighbors, or – what comes to the same thing – so as to do them the most good” (805; bk. 5, ch. 48). Naively likening “spending money so as not to injure one's neighbors” to “do[ing] them the most good,” Dorothea fails to grasp the self-interest at the core of nineteenth-century political economic thought and so misunderstands the subject matter before her: “Unhappily her mind slipped off [the book] for a whole hour; and at the end she found herself reading sentences twice over with an intense consciousness of many things, but not of any one thing contained in the text. This was hopeless” (805; bk. 5, ch. 48).